


Bury Them

by Poi



Category: X-Men (Movieverse)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2003-11-19
Updated: 2003-11-19
Packaged: 2017-10-02 10:55:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 606
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5533
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Poi/pseuds/Poi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What it means to win. AU for end of X2.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bury Them

**Author's Note:**

> (Written 2003?)

You last eight days in His dull, distant fortress; three to get bored of rhetoric and five to find the courage for defiance -- since it took no time at all to realise He's nothing like Xavier. He will not give you detention, or lines, or be Disappointed in your general direction.

You're not at all sure you want to know what He _will_ do, but your usual justifications only take a little longer than usual to suffice, and you hot-wire a car to the nearest town -- which was really more a village, and is now a graveyard.

No-one here will look down on you, or lynch you if you use your powers, and there's no-one here -- or anywhere -- that isn't One Of Us. You are, for the first time in your life, completely safe from Humans.

A few minutes with a radio confirms this silent town stretches a world across, six billion harmless bodies wide, and you have a visceral new understanding of the phrase "be careful what you wish for." Six billion, less a few million mutants, and who will bury them?

If you pushed yourself, you could turn flesh to ash, you could fire the whole place and watch it burn like you've fantasised about doing since you were thirteen. But you mechanically check backyards for sheds until you find one you don't have to break into, and take a shovel.

One grave each, because that's how it's done when things are done properly, that's what happens when someone dies and someone cares about it -- dumpsters and mass graves and unnamed ashes are for the unregretted. On top of each careful mound is a wallet or a photo or a best guess, so the headstones can be filled in later.

If it's the only thing you ever do right, it will all be done properly.

At grave 37, or 53, or 68 -- a number high enough to no longer be gagging at the smell and the rotting taste, to have given up frantically washing your hands after each one -- you feel Him at your back and straighten the edges of it while He talks. He talks about the same things He always talks about, in exactly the same way, as if nothing has changed. Victory and Costs and The Future and you know if you looked at Him you'd see the face of someone who got everything He ever wished for, and is still smugly making wishes.

When the edges are neat enough, you leave the shovel upright in the waiting pile of dirt, and He pauses. He is waiting, you realise, for your teenage tantrum, your righteous indignation. You were still angry, twenty or so corpses ago, but now you're just numb -- and anyway, it's not like you didn't know what He wanted, what He was willing to do for it.

What can you possibly say, now that He's turned out to be exactly what He said He was?

_I never thought you'd actually _win_?_

When you look down you find your blistered, bloody hands have already fallen to old habit, flicking a lighter in a way that, after eight days, He must be nearly as familiar with as your betrayed best friend. Who loved his bigoted Human parents and his stupid Human brother and did he bury _them_, you wonder, with his own hands? and you flick it open one last time and turn His flesh to ash.

If he had a face left to look surprised with, you judge, he would look surprised.

You drop the lighter in the neat, new grave and go to fetch a death you care about.


End file.
